Blowout Tide

By Joe Labriola:

You shift across the pebble-pocked sand, scouring the pale flaxen dunes for all manner of seaside treasures. Pink spiral shells and sand-smoothed stones are among your favorites, peeking out from the wild patchwork. But among these beautiful bits of beachside bounty, more than all else, you find trash.

You’ve noticed more in recent years. More and more. Harder and harder to ignore. Bleached water bottles and frayed strings sit tangled within the tidal muck. White bags hiss upon the tips of inland reeds, rippling in the cold March wind as if waving, as if wavering, as if breathing their surrender.

You aren’t a vagabond can collector or a hipster hobbyist. But you see. You see candy wrappers and drink caps. Glints of plastic waste simmer in the sunlit brine. You can’t say why you do it. You can’t say how much it helps. All you can say is that it just sort of feels like the right thing to do: picking it up, one piece at a time.

You and your four-legged companion work hard. Harder every time. You are the only two who seem to care, even as the ocean vomits more trash each weekend, seemingly to replace whatever you’ve filled your big black bag with, and then some.

“We just gotta keep at it, boy,” you say, struggling to maintain your balance upon a steep tuft as you pluck battered sandals and cracked milk jugs out of the weeds. “We’re doing good work.”

Your dog just sniffs and stares.

You continue this way for months. Years. You never venture beyond your route from the parking lot to the pier. There’s always plenty to clean right here. Always more and more.

But one day your old dog pants and wheezes. He sighs and slumps. The vet says he doesn’t have long. Maybe days. Maybe weeks. But not long. You know the truth but don’t want to believe it.

“It would be for the best if we put him down,” the vet tells you plainly.

“Not yet,” you strain to say back. “Not just yet.”

The next morning you take your old friend for one final stroll. It’s breezy, breezier than usual. But that’s never stopped you before. It’s slowed you, yes, but never stopped. You follow your usual path. Of course you don’t come close to getting it all. You never do. But you needn’t go far. You still fill your bags, and that seems to count for something.

“Biggest haul yet, boy!” you say through a gust, loading your garbage and recyclables into the trunk.

The old dog gazes back at you with big, shadowed eyes. He tugs on his leash. A weak motion but with conviction all the same. Maybe he knows?

You glance up toward the opposite direction where you’ve never ventured on your weekly cleaning treks. But why not? Why haven’t you ever gone that way? Because you like your way? Because you’re just used to it?

You don’t know such answers. But you smile tiredly and grab one more bag from the car.

You trudge down the beach together into the cutting wind. There’s even more trash this way. Much more. “Won’t get it all today, boy,” you call down to your friend. You continue, smiling as best as you can.

You stop after you reach a sharp bend along the dunes. You almost turn around here where the wind is strongest, rippling your loose shirt. But then you notice a small brushy clearing atop a stout cliff not far in the distance. Perched upon its edge are a group of teenagers: five or six scraggly-haired youths. They lounge in various positions, surrounded by beer cans and take-out food containers. Some of the debris has already trickled down the crumbling wall of hard-packed sand. You watch for a while. One kid hurls a sack of fast food remnants out into the water. Another chucks a half-empty beer at his friend, who dodges and shoves his friend back playfully.

They all laugh freely.

You open your dry mouth to cry out. But the warm wind sucks at your breath. You stare for another moment, and then finally just plop down in the sand, watching the trash-ridden tide rise closer.

“That’s enough, boy,” you say, scratching your old dog’s ear. “That’s enough.”

***

Joe Labriola is an author, podcaster, and professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University in New York. His short fiction usually features some speculative or environmental lens with the goal of helping to raise awareness about ocean plastic pollution. He regularly hosts beach clean up events, presents lectures, and tries to spread awareness however he can. You can most often find him scouring his local shores filming his detrashing experiences—and enjoying a swim once the water is cleaned.

The Dangerous Beach

By Fiona M Jones:

This is the biggest beach I have ever seen. We have driven miles along narrow winding roads, pausing to squeeze past the occasional vehicle coming the other way. We have parked by Goswick Golf Club and followed a path over two lines of dunes, and suddenly we are on flat sand. 

Sand and sand and sand, miles of it, and somewhere in the distance the North Sea. We head towards it. If a piece had fallen off the coast of Norway a few hours ago, a tsunami would be on its way. We’d run and run and never make it. We would DIE, I tell my niece and nephew, widening my eyes to scare them, but their father assures them there’s no tsunami forecast. I try again as we walk uphill ever so slightly: this would be a sandbar we’re standing on now. When the tide sweeps in on a stormy day you can find yourself surrounded, cut off from land. You would DROWN in the swirling grey tide as you struggle for land and find yourself only going deeper. The tide is actually still going out, someone observes, and my nephew and niece settle down to digging drainage channels and river systems in the waterlogged sand near the water’s edge. One of my sons wades in the water, looking for jellyfish, but all he finds is a partially-deflated helium balloon dropped out of air, washed up by water. It looks like a Portuguese man-o’-war jellyfish. Which can, of course, KILL you, probably with fear, if you were listening to the wisdom of your Aunty Fii, but nobody is. 

In the sand I hollow out five oversized toe-holes and follow up with an enormous artificial sole-indentation: a giant’s footprint. An imaginary monster has walked out of the sea. It will probably EAT you. The longsuffering niece and nephew help to smooth the work of my hands until it looks almost plausible. My son takes out his phone to record the monstrous footprint. We build little hills of sand, mountains standing between mini-rivers running down to the sea. This sand we’re building mountains with is the accumulated product of eroded mountains, I tell the children, who are growing in skepticism by the minute. It’s time to head homeward, exploring driftwood and flotsam on the way. The nephew forms an emotional attachment to an abandoned buoy the size of a space-hopper. Can he take it home? Will it fit through the door of his home if he does? Will there be enough room to live there if he gets it indoors? In the end he must content himself with the scrap of rope that we cut off the buoy, fatally blunting Aunty Fii’s scissors in the process. 

On the way back between the dunes, somebody stops to read the sign we passed earlier, half-obscured by dune-grasses. QUICKSAND, it tells us. And don’t touch any metal objects left over from the military training operations of yesteryear. Because they’ll EXPLODE. 

Didn’t I tell you this was a dangerous place? 

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. She writes short/flash/micro fiction, CNF and occasionally poetry. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.

Memories of Elsewhere: Heartbreak Beach, by Emma Venables

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… 

By Emma Venables:

Heartbreak Beach, Dinas Dinlle to everyone else, is in North Wales where I lived and studied for eight years. I’d never really explored anywhere beyond my university’s city, Bangor, until I met my best friend when working in retail. At a particularly difficult time in both our lives, she had just learned to drive and so we drove down those winding roads, the Welsh countryside wrapping around us like a comforter, in search of breathing space. I’d play DJ, feet on the dash (before I realised how dangerous it was), and we’d sing our blues away to Katy Perry, P!nk, and Lady Gaga. 

On Heartbreak Beach, we stood. Our wellies soaked by the sea. Hair frizzing in the wind. Cheeks stinging. We looked out at the Llŷn Peninsula, at the tip of Anglesey, at the weak sun hitting the Irish Sea. Breathing deep, taking it all in. Together, but alone in our thoughts. The view and atmosphere bestowing a definite calm on our addled minds which we carried with us into the car and back to our everyday lives. 

A few months later I took my dad and our dogs, Bobbi and Charlie, to Dinas Dinlle. My parents had just split up and whenever I think of this time, I’m reminded of a quote from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road: ‘They set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.’ I see us, walking on the sand, up and along the pebble banks, united in our heartbreak and confusion, with our two terriers running in and out, making our load a bit more bearable.

It was a gloomy day, clouds touching the cliffs. We were well wrapped up against the breeze that nipped at us with its puppy teeth. I had my digital camera with me, determined to document these special moments with dad and dogs. As I raised my camera, pressed the button to capture Charlie running at full pelt along the beach, my dad said there wasn’t any chance of the photograph coming out – Charlie was going so fast, he’d just be a white and brown-eared blur against a dull, yellow, background.

But the photograph did come out. It’s one of the best pictures I have of Charlie. All four paws off the ground, ears up, a smile seemingly on his face. Pure joy. A dog’s life. That photograph hangs on my wall now, Charlie’s collar and lead draped over it. He’s been gone for nearly three years, and that image brings as much sadness as it does joy, but I wouldn’t be without it. 

I haven’t been to Heartbreak Beach for such a long time, but when I sat down to write this piece, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, much to my surprise. There they were, memories of that beach in North Wales alongside sitting in a rowing boat on Lake Bled underneath a cloudless sky and walking through Berlin’s Tiergarten on a late summer evening with foxes and rabbits skittering here and there. Perhaps my mind keeps returning to Heartbreak Beach now because, for me, the times I’ve spent there encapsulate periods in my life where I felt confused and scared, concerned for what would happen next. I went there in search of breathing space, of head space, of more-to-life-than-this space, with the people closest to my heart and came away feeling a little bit lifted, a little more hopeful. 

When the lockdown comes to an end, I’ll return to Heartbreak Beach, Dinas Dinlle to everyone else. I’ll take my dad, my stepmum, and their rescue dog, meet my best friend there. We’ll clear the chaos from our heads, find ourselves again in the sea air, the sand, the glare of the sun hitting the Irish Sea.

***

Emma Venables is a writer and academic living on the Wirral. Her short fiction has recently featured in The Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Lunate, and Mslexia. Her first novel, The Duties of Women, will be published by Stirling Publishing in summer 2020. She can be found on Twitter: @EmmaMVenables.

Little Dyke Beach

Photo: Anne Wyman

By Joel Robert Ferguson:

First off, let's say that which can
go without saying, that the stony
beach is not the stretch it once was,
when my legs were brief from ground
to body and I held the mouth 
of a broken shell to my ear 
and heard nothing.

It's a short walk to the beach house
the one we’d always then turn
back at, ever crunching over the pebbles,
blue and pink, that outline the upper
reaches of the inter-tidal, before we return
to the town, the county hospital, where
what must happen will happen.

Prairie kid, born Winnipegger,
downplaying the duress of Confusion Corner,
your feet in the Atlantic, if
the muck of the Minas Basin
at low tide can be called ocean.

It can, if
the roofs and new asphalt
where the old folks used
to lay out the dulse with its snails
drying in the sun (to hell with toxins) 

for sale or snack,
if that dredged-forest could be called land. 

It can.

***

Joel Robert Ferguson is the author of the poetry collection The Lost Cafeteria (2020, Signature Editions). He grew up in the Nova Scotian village of Bible Hill and now divides his time between Winnipeg and Montreal, where he is finishing his Masters in English Literature at Concordia University.

First There is a Mountain, by Katie Paterson

First There is a Mountain 2019 Image © Katie Paterson / First There is a Mountain is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and Arts Council England

By Sara Bellini:

Every Sunday for the duration of British Summer Time Katie Paterson is touring the British Isles with her new participatory artwork until the end of October. The title is First There is a Mountain and it engages the spectators in building sand mountains on their local beach, using buckets that are shaped after five real mountains: Mount Kilimanjaro (Africa), Mount Shasta (North America), Mount Fuji (Asia), Stromboli (Europe) and Uluru (Oceania). The forms themselves are made out of corn-starch-based bio-plastic, which will be composted at the end of the season. The mountains will be taken over by the rising tide, bringing the participants’ attention to geological processes and the UK disappearing coastlines. 

First There is a Mountain 2019 Image © Phil Rees, Swansea Bay with Glynn Vivian Art Gallery / First There is a Mountain is supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and Arts Council England

First There is a Mountain explores time and our relation to the environment and connects the local with the distant landscape of other continents through the minimal constituent of the sand grains. Katie Paterson’s artworks, from black holes to fossils,bring together scientific research and poetic sensitivity and make the viewers consider their space in the universe and the ancient and eternal beauty of the natural world we inhabit.

Check out the website to find out about the project locations and the pieces of writing commissioned for every single one of them:

Project website and next events
Katie Paterson's website

Hiraeth

Photo: jessica sealey

By Aoife Inman:

It’s late but the evening light lingers at the peripheries of the ocean making the day stretch long into the night. Time seems to stretch here, the minutes distorted by the quiet swell of the ocean.

The air is full of mist; it pads out the twilight zone between the last dregs of evening and the soft beginnings of the morning. I’ve always thought this is an almost mythical piece of the day, when it’s neither light nor dark and the sky is damp and thick with salt, brushed in off the incoming tide. You can hold the mist between your teeth, wads of it pressed against the insides of your cheeks like cotton.

There aren’t many who bother to come down to the sea front at this hour, with the weather, as it is, temperamental and unforgiving. The wind bites and scratches at any scrap of skin left bare to the element and my thighs are lined with small red welts and scratches – the claws of the ocean have dug their way into me, right to the bone. Today, however, there are a few faces who peer palely over in my direction as I trail down the hill – van dwellers, keen surfers and fishermen, who are all, themselves, half brine and barely human, at least in the city sense of the word.

This was always the place I felt most at home, not here specifically but this ocean, this crack of coastline that juts out obstinately, defiant and secluded. It feels a million mile away from the industrial powerhouse cities I’ve made my home now.

Home. It’s a strange word whose weight has always felt uncomfortable in my mouth, hard and bitter. I was born on the road, moving between a collection of cardboard houses, each one like the last and yet lacking something. I resided in houses, habitats, a series of rooms, plaster, mortar and board – safe and comfortable but never permanent. To belong to just one place strikes me as an exhausting concept.

I thought when I had grown up that I’d settle somewhere; that I’d stop moving and plant some roots, or whatever the metaphor is, but I’ve realised that those moments, those years spent on the road, they get into your bones over time. Slowly, you barely feel it at first, but I can’t stay still now. I’ve tried, time and time again, found a place I love and settled there with a job and a plan and a circle of friends and then I feel that itch, again, against the soles of my feet. It’s like a disease, that itch, that want for change, it’s exhausting sometimes.

I walk along the cliff path, away from the cove, to the world’s edge where the grassy slope seems to fall away into the deafening blue. It’s a steep rocky path carved right into the grit and soil of the cliff, the sort that has been etched by many pairs of feet, worn over many years. When the tide eventually comes in it will cut off this path completely, a void of cold, blue Atlantic filling the space where my feet have trod. Nothing about the breadth or surface of this terrain is easily digestible. It’s a wholegrain, bran and fibre sort of landscape – some find it lonely, harsh, and unforgiving – I find myself falling in love with the rough corners of it every time I return.

When I was a child we were taught to spot currents on cliffs like this, our hands tracing the motions of the sea, trailing the lines of white foam that spread across the ocean like a film. I reach out my hand to lay it on the horizon, palm obscuring the bulb of the grey sun.

If you follow the cliff path round the curling edge of the peninsula you reach a town, a knot of tangled streets that overlap one another like old strings, every one gnarled with potholes and cobbles. I follow it now, zigzagging through kissing gates and through fields of thick grass. Everything is further apart here, houses and gardens stretch along the street, sand banks drag the beaches way out into the bay and the years seem to trickle by – I do not have to measure time so carefully here, there are months to spare.

The town is simple, a harbour filled with thin fishing boats and crab pots, a lifeboat house, a shop selling spades and 99 cones. It’s fixed in another time, another era where people worked with their hands, in the earth and the water.

This place is filled with mysticism, steeped in folklore, luck bound in rhymes and patterns of three. It’s everywhere you look, tucked in corners of woodland and thin waterfalls where faerie stacks topple. Down in the town the boats that jut out into the cove are named after mythical lands and magical creatures, suspicion has wormed its way amongst the men who tend the land and drag the sea.

“Look down there.” The mother leans into the clove of her son’s ear as she speaks. “Look down at that boat there, see the lions on its side?”

Sure enough, on its flanks are painted two yellow lions, their manes dipping and rising out of the green waters.

“They’re named after the legend of Lyonnesse…legend says there used to be a beautiful isle just set above Seven Stones reef that is halfway out to the Scillies. The city of lions and the land of Lyonesse, built with 140 churches atop it and a castle they say, all swallowed up in a single night by the ocean.”

The boy’s eyes widens as he listens, his hands gripping the handrails with his chubby palms.

His mother crouches down by his side, “look now do you see the top of the steeple there, just jutting out of the waves?”

He nods, eyes fixed on the grey sea.

The light is fading now, obscuring the edges of the day. Home, it’s a strange thing I think again, I wrap my tongue around it, a lump in the hollow of my mouth. It’s everywhere here and yet it feels distant. It’s in the lilt of the mother’s curling accent, the one I have lost over so many years spent away. It’s in each vowel, full bodied and warm, the crackle of pebbles under rubber boots in the evening tide, the low thud of water turning cliff to rubble.

I collect them in my palms as I count them, feel the weight of the love I hold for this place, and close my eyes as the day melts.

About the author:
Aoife Inman is a writer and historian based between Cornwall and Manchester. Her short stories have been published in Electric Reads’ Young Writers Anthology 2017 and New Binary Press’ 2018 Autonomy collection, as well as being long-listed for the 2016 Royal Academy Short Story Award. 

The War Memorial in the Sea

By David Lewis:

On a grey summer’s afternoon the Crosby beach is busy with holidaymakers.  The waterfront of Liverpool follows the great curve of the Mersey as it pours into the Irish Sea, but at Crosby the urban sprawl runs out of enthusiasm and is broken with open spaces – playing fields, parks, farms.  At the end of the long promenade there is a Lifeboat station, an ice cream van, a car park.  Here the long beach starts, the hard sands that run along the coast to the Lune river estuary fifty kilometres or so north.  This is a raw coastline.  The Irish Sea is a cold expanse of water, emptier than it once was, although the slow container ships still slip quietly in and out of Liverpool.  There are cruise ships now as well, vast white hotels drawn by the renaissance of the city centre.  Haunted by the cries of gulls, the coastline sprawls beneath vast mutating cloudscapes and feels wary and unpredictable. 

Beyond the Lifeguard station a low flat field of broken stones runs for two hundred, maybe three hundred metres along the shore.  At the beach’s edge the stones are slippery with seaweed; pools form among the stones, limpets colonise the surfaces.  It looks like builders’ rubble and most visitors ignore it in favour of Antony Gormley’s famous Another Place sculptures and the great expanse of hard golden sand.  But there is deep history here, old stories in these stones, there is remembrance, and there is forgetting.

Close up, this is unusual rubble; Victorian bricks dissolved by the salt water into gritty, lumpy, mosaic sand, chunks of sea-glass worn pale-grey and smooth, ancient bleached china electrical fittings. But the clue to this landscape does not lie in the bricks.  There are larger pieces; not uncut stones, not quarry-refuse, not landfill.  They are architecture. 

Some of these pieces are small, a metre long, but others are quite large – the size of a sofa, say, or an upright piano.  Some are hand-carved sandstone, deep flowers fading into sand; others are granite, untouched by seaweeds or limpets, as sharp as the day they left the mason’s yard in the 1870s.  Some have letters carved into them, a teasing suggestion of names and landmarks.  I have often wanted to identify the buildings they came from, through old photographs and architects’ plans.  Would it be possible to separate these small piles of loss back into individual buildings and fit them together like a sea-worn jigsaw puzzle?  Ultimately they could be restored to the street; the cornices and friezes, words and titles once again seventy feet above the pavements.  But what would this achieve?  Standing on the shore, this dream no longer seems possible or even desirable. 

These ruins were taken from the cityscape of Liverpool and especially Bootle, cleared after the terrible blitzkrieg unleashed by the Germans in 1940 and 1941.  Once these fragments were parts of banks, insurance offices and hotels, buildings which added dignity and strength to the streets.  Every stone comes from a bombed building, every brick comes from a bombed house, perhaps from a house where people died.  And so this long field of stones and bricks is a war memorial.  Not a solemn classical monument at the heart of the city, but a war memorial nevertheless.  4000 people died in Liverpool in the Blitz, and Bootle alone lost over 400.  This is an informal war memorial open to the elements, a war memorial washed twice a day by the tides, a war memorial covered in seaweed. There is no forced solemnity, no guards, no flags, no eternal flame.  No Dulce, no Decorum.  Children scramble over these ruins, they hunt for shrimps in the pools among the weedy stones, sit on the warm sand with their backs to giant lumps of the city.  Adults take pieces of brick as souvenirs, perhaps to remember the dead, perhaps remembering the war itself.  Most do not know the history of these fragments, these splinters of city.  It is irrelevant.  Nothing can be done to them without heavy machinery, no amount of souvenir hunters can damage the integrity of these stones and bricks.  Three hundred metres long, but how deep?  Without massive human interference, only time will fade these ruins.

At dusk in the summer the beach is clear.  This is not the Mediterranean; the cool air from the Irish Sea means that on the warmest day the heat does not linger.  The lights come on in Wallasey three kilometres away across the Mersey, and the ruins fade into the dusk again, as they have done every night since the late 1940s.  I do not think that this memorial-landscape should be formalised, protected, solemnised; this should be a quiet place to remember our unknown dead in a very Liverpool way, informal but never unserious, to the lament of waves running across the evening sands and gulls crying in a grey sky. 

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter